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Thomas Johnson Westropp was one of the most respected of antiquarians to have passed through Quin. Here he challenges the accepted wisdom that the abbey was built in 1402. 1433 is the year in which Pope Eugenius IV grants a licence or official recognition to this Franciscan Friary. This is also often used as the date that construction began. He relies here on the report from another visitor, Thomas Deane in 1884. Both assert that the abbey is much older but that construction of the Transept (on your right after you enter the abbey) began after this date.

Father Luke Wadding, a senior member of the Franciscan Order, based in Rome in the sixteenth century, puts the date of re-construction by the McNamara’s at 1350 (or older). 

The Annals of the Four Masters were begun nearly a century after Luke Wadding, a Waterford friar. These annals were compiled in a Franciscan house by four ‘masters’, one of whom was a Franciscan. Who to believe? is it possible that Síoda McNamara, not then compelled to abide by Roman protocol, started to convert the castle ruins soon after dislodging the Normans and sought the popes blessing later on?

“Popular guide-books always follow the ‘Four Masters’ in attributing the Franciscan convent of Quin to Sioda MacNamara in 1402. It was certainly largely rebuilt and ornamented at that time, but the many earlier features show that Wadding is right in placing its foundation before 1350. The fact that it was built on and out of the ruins of a great castle was noted by Sir Thomas Deane in 1884.

I first identified the castle,—which he attributed to Brian Boru, but which is an unmistakably Norman court, with great circular turrets at three angles,—with the ‘round-towery, strong castle’ built by Thomas de Clare in 1280 at Cuinche. It is likely that the MacNamaras, after the fall of Bunratty in 1334 and before 1350, gave its site, as a thanks offering for their victory, to God and the monks of St. Francis, so I shall place the legends of the ‘Abbey’ in this period.

Tradition near Tulla points to some enclosures, a little over a mile from the village and in low ground at the foot of ‘Abbey Hill,’ as the place where ‘the MacNamaras began to build Quin Abbey.’ The quarry from which its stones were drawn is shown on the hillside. At Quin it is said to have been built by the Gobán Saor, the famous legendary Master Builder, to whom so many Round Towers, churches, castles, and abbeys of the ninth to the fifteenth centuries are attributed. He twisted the spiral pillars in its beautiful cloister with his own hands. One of the builders fell from the roof and was killed, where an ancient tombstone, with an axe incised on it, marks the place of his burial. “

County Clare Folk-Tales and Myths, Thomas J Westropp

When was the castle built?

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Queen [sic, Quin] Castle. Drawing of the Franciscan Friary which was founded in 1433 using part of the walls of an older Norman castle built in 1280, Quin. National Library of Ireland.

 

The annals (AFM), referred to by Westropp, faced a chronological conundrum, as did some later historians, in trying to resolve the short time spent in Quin by Thomas De Clare with the construction of a substantial castle. The annals resolve this by stating that the whole enterprise was completed in 10 months. Thomas Newenham Deane ( in his report to the Royal Irish Academy, see reference at end of this post) explained it by asserting it to have been built by Brian Boru.

 

The castle comprises 10ft wide walls with moat & bailey (as discovered by the TVAS excavation) and would have required a lot of skilled man-power and materials to be transported to site. Its hard to believe that all of this took place right in the middle of Uí Caisin – McNamara territory and two miles from the inauguration place of the Dalcassian kings!

N.C. MacNamara (antiquarian, surgeon 1833 – 1918) in his ‘History of an Irish Sept’, suggests that Robert De Musgroe, who was granted ownership of Thomond by Henry III before Thomas De Clare, may have built some type of fort, possibly timber, in Quin before De Clare arrived. He suggests that the Normans and McNamara’s may have lived side by side on opposite banks of the river in Quin. Is it possible that the native Irish lived peacefully alongside the Normans, in a mutually beneficial arrangement, until De Clare went too far in trying to control territory? Successful trade arrangements often led to transferance of skills and even integration through marriage.

References:

* The question is, who built the fortress? It cannot have been built subsequently to 1278 or 1433. The Norman invasion (Henry II.) was in 1171. Can it be possible that so formidable a building, surrounded by a moat, earth works, etc., could have been built and also razed within a century, without a note of its existence being extant ? Discarding this idea as most improbable, we must look backwards to the time of Brian Boru, 1002, and come to the conclusion that the fortress of which we now find the remains in connexion with Quin Abbey was erected prior to the Norman Invasion, thus indicating a period of civilization anterior to 1711, in which military requirements were well known.

 

Thomas Newenham Deane Source: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Polite Literature and Antiquities, Vol. 2 (1879 – 1888), pp. 201-204

What did the Anglo Normans ever do for us?

We are well aware of the impact of the Anglo-Norman invasion on our history, the undermining of Gaelic society and the replacement of our native structures. Poor old Diarmuid MacMurrough takes a lot of blame for all of this, despite the fact that Henry II in England had already sought and had been given approval by Pope Adrian to invade and civilise us. Henry was just waiting to finish his war in France before sorting us out!

Anyway, in they came, conquered, settled, married and eventually becoming more Irish than even ourselves, ‘níos gaelaí ná na Gaeil féin’! But besides building towns and castles, robbing our women (and probably taking our jobs!), what did the Anglo-Normans do for us – if anything?

Well, for one, they gave us a whole new suite of names, both forename and surname, to choose from.

The Norman influence on Irish surnames

Following the invasion of 1169, a large number of Anglo-French first and last names entered into Ireland. Many, such as Power, Browne, Fleming, Joyce, Burke, Barry, Costello, Nagle, Nugent, D’arcy, Roche and Walsh/Welsh/Wallace, are nowadays considered Irish and are commonly found in Clare. So, too, are those with the Fitz prefix such as Fitzmaurice, Fitzgerald, Fitzgibbon and Fitzpatrick which most people would regard as Irish as the shamrock. Fitz, meaning ‘son of’, can be considered the Norman version of Mac (it derives from the Latin/French ‘fils de’, meaning ‘son of’). Burke came from de Burgh, Roche from de Roiste, Power from de Paor.

In 1366, a law was passed that “Every Englishman do use the English language, and be named by an English name, leaving off entirely the manner of naming used by the Irish.” This was introduced to dissuade the settlers from adopting Celtic prefixes or forms of surname. It didn’t have much affect as many settler families added Mac or ‘O’ and Norman names evolved into an Irish form (eg McHenry, McArthur).

In 1465 a law was passed enacting “that every Irishman that dwells betwixt or amongst Englishmen in the County of Dublin, Myeth, Vriell, and Kildare … shall take to him an English Surname of one town, as Sutton, Chester, Trym, Skryne, Corke, Kinsale; or colour, as white, blacke, browne; or arte or science, as smith or carpenter; or office, as cooke, butler ….”

Many of the trades of the early medieval period such as Archer, Butler, Cooper, Carpenter, Draper, Skinner, Tanner found their way into our surnames. Other introductions from this period came from the mercenary soldiers who accompanied the Norman invasion: Walsh (meaning Welsh), Joyce and Fleming (from Flemish mercenaries) are examples.

Incidentally, the Normans usually took their surnames from the place of their family origins. So, D’arcy originates in Arcy in Normandy. De Clare originates in Clare in Suffolk where the Anglo-Norman family were based. While De indicated their place of origin, Le was used to describe them, eg Le Poer meant ‘a poor person’.

De Burgh – Burke – from a placename in Suffolk, France

Le Botilier – Butler – Occupation bottle steward

De Barra – Barry – from an estate in Wales

Le Waleys – Walsh – the Welshmen

De Angulo – Costello/Nangle – from Nangle Pembrokeshire

What of their influence on forenames?

 Many of the Normans forenames introduced here were of a biblical or European saintly origin.

 In 1922, Reverend Patrick Woulfe wrote extensively on the topic of Irish name origins as follows:

In the same manner Norman and English names became current in Irish families during the thirteenth and subsequent centuries. These have now almost completely supplanted the old Gaelic names. The names borne by the Normans and by them introduced into Ireland, were of three kinds :

 (1) names of Scandinavian origin which their ancestors had carried with them to Normandy ;

(2) names of Germanic origin which the Frankish conquerors had brought across the Rhine and which had ousted the old Celtic and Latin names from France ; and

(3) Biblical names and Latin and Greek names of saints,, which the Normans began to adopt about the beginning of the eleventh century.

Together with these came in a few Celtic names from Brittany, a small number of Anglo-Saxon names, some Danish and Norse names from England, and one or two British or Welsh names. These were nearly all very rare and most of them soon died out. Of the Anglo-Saxon names, only two, Edmund and Edward, survived. Alfred has been revived in recent times. At the period of the Invasion, Frankish names were by far the most popular among the Normans, but Biblical and saintly names were coming rapidly into favour.

The following is a list, in order of frequency, of the more common names borne by the early Anglo- Norman invaders, the Biblical and saintly names of Latin and Greek origin being printed in italics :

William, Robert, Richard, John, Walter, Roger, Ralph, Adam, Hugh, Henry, Thomas, Nicholas, Gilbert, Geoffrey, Elias, Peter (Piers), Osbert, Reginald, Jordan, Simon, Alan, Stephen, Philip, David, Arnold, Alexander, Laurence, Baldwin, Herbert, Martin, Maurice, Godfrey, Andrew, Alfred, James, Samson, Turstein, Warin, Ailward, Daniel, Edward, Gregory, Bernard, Benedict, Hamon, Matthias, Michael, Gerard, Gervase, Lambert, Wilkin, Patrick, Edmund, Edwin, Hubert, Ivor, Joseph, Oliver, Mark.

 The following in alphabetical order were rare :

 Abraham, Adelard, Ailmer, Antony, Augustine, Brian, Clement, Constantine, Estmund, Eustace, Everard, Gocelin, Isaac, Leonard, Luke, Matthew, Miles, Milo, Odo, Osbern, Osmund, Pagan, Ponce, Randulf, Redmund, Rodulf, Silvester, Turold, Ulf, Vincent.

 The following names only came in, or at least became popular, at a later period :

Bartholomew, Christopher, Francis, Gerald, George, Paul, Roland, Theobald.

 Women’s names among the Normans were nearly all of the Biblical or saintly class:

 Agnes, Alice, Amelina, Anastasia, Annabella, Catherine, Cecily, Christina, Dorothy, Egidia, Eleanor, Evelyn, Frances, Honora, Isabella, Johanna, Matilda, Margaret, Susanna.

 The name Mary does not seem to have come into use in Ireland before the end of the16th century. Brigid only began to be used about the same period.

 

Extracted from ‘Sloinnte Gaedheal is Gall’, Patrick Woulfe 1922

Out with the old, in with the new

The Anglo-Normans also brought with them new animal species such as the rabbit and fallow deer, new foods such as wheat, orchard fruits, mutton and farming practices such as hay-making. They introduced us to continental European religious saints and practices of the Roman Church. European religious orders soon followed such as the Franciscans, Augustinians, Cistercians, Dominicans etc. These replaced the structures of the native Irish Christian Church.

Up to then, the Irish natives did not adopt the name of saints as they considered this to be placing themselves on a par with the saint. Such naming convention was reserved for those of higher status in the monasteries. This was circumvented by use of the prefix Maol or Giolla meaning follower or servant. The Normans changed all of that and it was now acceptable to be called Peter, James, Michael, John, Mary, Brigid or Margaret.

Very few of us to this day do not have either a forename or surname that is not of Norman origin. Eventually, arising from the Gaelic Revival in the late 19th century, new Irish language versions of these forenames appeared such as Séan, Seamus, Peadar, Máire, Bríd, Mícheál, Cathal and many more appeared.

The Irish Church did not condemn the practice of slave-trading by the Irish until the invasion by the Anglo-Normans and the encroachment of the Roman Church. The story of Patrick (Patricius, son of a Roman administrator), which was introduced here after the Norman conquest, presents the native Irish as uncivilised pagan slavers who needed to be brought to heel. So the Normans inadvertently gave us our native saint and a forename for a good chunk of our population for generations following.

Out with the new, in with the old

Children are rarely given these European saint names today. Authentic Gaelic forenames are much more popular. We are nevertheless, unlikely to see the demise of the Anglo-Normans surnames that were introduced here. But all of us Mikes, Jimmies, Johnnys, Paddys, Kittys, Cathys, Maggies and Bridies can thank the Normans for what they brought us!